Mobile Music

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT MOBILE MUSIC - PAGE 3

Hardly any attention has been given to the new music sub-sulture which has developed over the last few decades, namely the tunes played by organisational switchboards while you wait to be connected to the person you wish to speak to. And each organisation switchboard appears to have its own signature-tune which is meant to keep you entertained while you hang on waiting for Godot to come on the line. Suffering as it does from a colonial hangover like other areas of our socio-politico-economic milieu, the Indian organisation switchboard sometimes seems to prefer ye olde Englishe tunes like the popular 16th-17th century number Greensleeves.

NEW DELHI: Targeting more revenue from value-added services, Bharti Televentures on Monday launched 'Ring Back Tone' facility -- a personalised mobile music service for its pre and post paid mobile customers. The Hello Tunes service -- which enables customers to replace his traditional Ring Back tone worth a personlised sound file comes with a monthly rental of Rs 30 and Rs 15 per download of songs both Hindi and English, Atul Bindal, chief marketing officer, BTVL told reporters here.

NEW DELHI: Leading cellular operator Airtel Airtel has crossed 75 mn music downloads which includes 'Hello Tunes' as well as ring tones of all forms including MP3, truetones, polytones and monotones. The company has also started offering Full Music and Full Music Video downloads, which are priced at Rs 20 and Rs 30 repsectively. The company's Airtel Signature Tune by A R Rehman has become one of the most popular mobile music with four million downloads. The 'Full Music' and 'Full Music Video Downloads' service is available in over 27 mobile phone models, said Hemant Sachdev, director, marketing and communications, Bharti Airtel said.

SINGAPORE: MTV Networks (MTVN), a unit of Viacom Inc. announced on Friday that it will launch a new brand - FLUX - on June 30. FLUX will initially be launched in Japan as the world's first mobile entertainment community. FLUX has secured an exclusive deal with Utada, Japan's biggest female artist, to launch the world's first mobile music video series. FLUX will be a new subscription-based service delivering entertainment and music via mobile and online networks to consumers in Japan.

MUMBAI: Motorola on Friday launched its first 3-D surround sound music phone, E398 and has tied up with music company EMI as a part of its strategy to target the youth. Combining a music player in a mobile, the new phone enables users to carry their personalised play lists wherever they go and targets the needs of multiple consumer segments also, Motorola general manager (southwest Asia) Percy P Batlivala told newspersons here. The tie-up with EMI is a natural patnership for Motorola to consolidate its ownership of mobile music space in India, he added.

In a bid to grab a larger share of the growing digital mobile music market, Nokia, the world's largest handset maker said it has agreed to buy US-based digital music distributor Loudeye for $60 million (Euro 80 million). Nokia said it had offered $4.50 per share in cash to Loudeye shareholders, a premium of more than 150 per cent over the shares' closing price on Monday. Shares in Loudeye surged at the start of trade on Tuesday and were up 146 per cent at $4.36.

HYDERABAD: Airtel on Thursday launched Enhanced Data Rate for Global Evolution (EDGE) network in Andhra Pradesh with data transfer speed as high as 200 kbps. Customers would be able to experience rich multimedia content including live TV on their EDGE-enabled mobile handsets, multi player mobile gaming, music and file transfer, picture download, e-mail download with attachments and all the content of Airtel live, K Srinivas, CEO, Bharti Cellular, AP, said. As a part of the Phase I rollout plan, EDGE services will be launched in Ludhiana, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Cochin, Coimbatore, Jaipur and Lucknow, Srinivas said.

MUMBAI: At the fifth edition of Nokia Music Connects, the focus of discussion was getting all stakeholders in the music industry to work together to propel growth - whether it's building the streaming music, and live entertainment markets, or curbing piracy. "We all mutually recognise and are aware of the power that togetherness can generate," said Vijay Lazarus, president, Indian Music Industry at the event. The keynote address was delivered by Satyan Gajwani, CEO, Times Internet, who made the point that the industry needs to curb "an easy alternative called piracy and encourage consumers to move away from it. " That's one of the objectives of Times Internet's streaming music service Gaana, which was launched three years ago, "to provide easy access to music", he pointed out. And while over the last three years streaming service has been offered via the PC, the future mandate is to build it on mobile.

NEW DELHI: Buoyed by its success, US mobile handset maker Motorola on Wednesday launched another entry level 'MOTOYUVA' phone?eighth in the series during 2008, priced at Rs 5,150. The MOTOYUVA EM 325 comes with mobile music experience to the user with one-touch access to MP3 library and expandable memory of up to 2GB, company officials said. FM Share utilises RDS2 (Radio Data System) technology, allowing the user to share information about a favorite station with friends by sending it in a text message.

NEW DELHI: After roping in ace photographer Raghu Rai and fashion designer Vikram Phadnis as part of marketing initiative, Nokia on Wednesday announced launching an album of sufi singer Rabbi Shergill on its Nseries mobile phones. The album--Avengi Ja Nahi-- will be pre-loaded on N95, N70 music edition and N73 music edition phones of Nokia. It will be launched on music CDs by Yash Raj Music in the first week of May. "The announcement breaks new grounds for mobile music and entertainment in India, bringing people closer to their passion for music and performers closer to listeners in ways we would never have imagined," Nokia India Marketing Director Devinder Kishore told reporters here.